The Day I Stopped Translating Myself

I live in five languages. None of them gets the whole of me.

I negotiate in English, I structure in German, I count in Romanian, always in Romanian. Spanish holds my warmest years. French reads quietly over my shoulder and occasionally corrects my menus.

Life in five layers sounds glamorous. In practice it means every feeling has to clear customs before it becomes a sentence.

In German meetings I would launch a sentence like a ship, then pray the verb arrives at the end. German verbs travel last. So does clarity. You learn patience, or you sink.

And there is the accent discount. A room hears my accent and quietly lowers its expectations, for about four minutes. Then the numbers start. I have watched the same face change a hundred times, minute five is my favorite minute in business.

For years I did something worse than translating my words. I translated myself. Softer than my Romanian directness. Cooler than my Latin warmth. More formatted than my instinct. I thought that was the entry fee for belonging.

Then one day, in a room where a difficult number needed an owner, I said the sentence the way I would say it at my own kitchen table. Direct. Warm. Unformatted. The room went quiet. Then the room wrote it down.

That was the day the translation stopped. Nobody pays for the translation. They pay for the original.

Only Daisy, our dog, understood me all along, in all five languages. Mostly because dinner ☺️ sounds the same in every one of them.

Photo: 100% real. So is the accent.